How it Had to Be
by caputdraconis14
Summary: A Lily and James fanfic. By some miracle, James Potter has grown up and Lily honestly doesn't know how to handle it. She would love to treat him with the same coldness as she used to, but Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix (right there in Hogwarts!) have different plans that continue to force the two of them together. Details their seventh year through their deaths.


Chapter 1: The Usual Voldemort News

James

The cold green glance pierced me from above the book. I winked back at her, impervious to the same stare I'd been receiving for as long as I could remember. At least she was looking at me, I would say to Padfoot, if he made any note of it, though he seemed too busy with his cornflakes (not falling asleep in them) to pay any attention to a typical morning Evans/Potter interaction.

I chose this seat simply to annoy her. She liked to get to breakfast early (I'd overheard something about the marmalade being better the earlier she got there, which I didn't really understand but found fairly adorable) and her friends didn't. I liked to get there before her friends and take the seats I knew she wished they would have and fill them instead with all of my best mates. I didn't understand why, after about three years of me doing this, she hadn't caught on and decided to go to breakfast later. I guess the marmalade was worth sitting across from my arrogant face and brilliantly windswept Quidditch hair for about a half an hour.

Her friends drifted in one by one, sliding into seats as close to her as possible, too sleepy to gripe at me for my blatant interference. When most of the Great Hall was filled with students, the familiar early morning flutter of wings alerted me to the arrival of the post. Everyone's heads tilted up, waiting for those packages of things they had accidentally left at home.

A large barn owl and a tawny screech dropped down on the Gryffindor table, one in front of me and the other in front of Evans. I removed the _Daily Prophet _from around its leg and gave it a knut, while Evans paid for her own copy in front of me. I was the designated subscriber in my group of mates and I would read the paper first, pass it along to whichever one of them sat closest to me and eventually it would end up back on my bed in the dormitory, well read, crumpled, worn out and occasionally spilled on by a meal or a potion gone awry.

"Anything exciting in the news today, Lily?" Emmeline Vance asked, leaning over Wormtail to ask Lily.

"The usual Voldemort news," Evans replied, thumbing past the front page. She frowned. "What a terrible wizard, you know." She sighed. "This is more depressing than it is informative." She grumbled slightly under her breath and I couldn't help but be a little mesmerized even by that. I just didn't understand why I was so desperately in love with her or whatever the hell I was, but I was and I couldn't fix that problem any time soon.

I turned to my own paper, reading the headlines about other disappearances mostly attributed to this rising evil, Voldemort, and his band of well-trained, horrible followers who fondly called themselves "Death Eaters." I glanced over at the Slytherin table. A clump of sixth and seventh years had settled at one end, a very dark sort of group huddled around their own papers and breakfasts, others with their noses buried in books. Mulciber, Avery, Snape, and Sirius' little brother, the naive and brainwashed Regulus who looked young for his age, almost hesitant to be in the group, sitting on the edge. Occasionally, I saw him cast a reverent glance at the others, though I didn't know what there really was to revere. Despite the tragedy of his choices, I figured Regulus would make a more formidable Death Eater than the others, though he didn't have the evil pit of a heart that they all possessed.

Shaking my head, I flipped to what remained of the Quidditch section of the paper. I would sift through the rest of the terrible news in time, maybe when the paper was returned to me, if it wasn't too crumpled. I needed to know, but dwelling on it over breakfast would only distract me from my first day. The first day of seventh year was an important one, made all the more so by my newly acquired title of Head Boy.

When I stepped into the prefect's carriage on the train the morning before, I expected a look of poorly concealed (meaning not even an attempt thereat) shock on Evans' face. Instead, she looked me up and down, shrugged and turned to address the prefects. I didn't understand why she wasn't appalled, because even my mates had been in awe that the title had been granted to me and not to Remus instead. I hated the feeling that Evans knew something I didn't, mostly because I was nosy.

I folded the newspaper up and slid it across the table to Padfoot who accepted it gratefully. He skimmed the front page, making faces at every terrible thing plastered across it, like I always did. I could tell he didn't want to read it and ruin his breakfast either. I didn't quite know what the world was coming too, but I could tell that it wasn't long now, until we arrived.

Turning my attention away from the dismal, I piled some more bacon onto my plate and waved my wand to bring the pumpkin juice a little closer to me. Meanwhile, along the table, Professor McGonagall handed out our schedules for the year, tapping the blank cards so that they filled themselves out to the specifics of every student along the way. I knew I would be in every class with Evans, except for one each where we differed. I took Ancient Runes instead of Arithmancy, whichs he took. Other than that, our Herbology, Potions, Defense, Transfiguration and Charms would line up perfectly with each other's. I liked this, simply because it guaranteed I got to spend time with her. The way I saw it, the more time I spent around her, the sooner she would see that I wasn't the same James Potter she had turned down a hundred times. Not all the way, at least.

-CD-

Lily:

Another year- the final year to be exact. I stood gracefully on the edge of everything, tipping slowly toward the rest of my life. In just a few short months I would be there to embrace the years and years ahead of me and live them in just the way I always imagined I would: perfection. And not perfection like everything in its proper place, perfect job, perfect house kind of perfection. Just everything I ever dreamed of having, an organized chaos family, a job I mostly loved but usually didn't want to go to, the typical dream of anyone, Muggle or Wizard, I thought.

Of course, not everything would go as planned this year. I knew that from the very beginning of summer when I started in on something and my involvement grew to incomprehensible depths. I never expected the passionate response some things triggered within me, but there they were. And then, of course, when I found out through the grapevine (a brief mention in one of the owls between Remus and me this summer) that James Potter was named Head Boy I became fully aware of the fact that this year was not going to be easy on my sanity either.

Yes, yes, he'd grown up a bit, stopped disregarding the rules since that day at the lake in fifth year, tried to shape up a bit... As if my once-and-for-all angry outburst had stirred some amelioration inside of him. But you know the saying, a leopard can't change his spots. Underneath his attempts, he was still just as arrogant, just as much of an arse. That had to be part of his nature. I decided I would wait patiently for it to appear in the seventh year, having only caught glimpses of it in sixth.

With Emmeline, Marlene and Mary, we followed him and his charming group of friends (charming only applied to Remus and even that was questionable at times) out of the Great Hall toward the shared class of Potions, which we had first. I couldn't deny a deep love of Potions, followed by Charms and Defense close behind.

"I still think the three of them are simply gorgeous," Marlene whispered under her breath, trying to kindly exclude poor Peter from her assessment of the boys in front of them. I followed her gaze to the other three, Remus, Sirius and James and assessed for a moment. I did still have eyes after all and whether or not I approved of their other actions and personal traits, I was still allowed to look at them.

I couldn't help but agree with Marlene's statement. Since they all truly came into their own in the last few years, there was no denying it. Remus, haggard as he often looked, had developed some handsome shoulders and nice bone structure, and his hair, cut neatly, glimmered a red gold in the sunlight streaming in through the windows in the corridors. And then there was Sirius, with his unkempt, long black locks and regular scruff, he was the tallest of the three, narrowly built but muscled just the same. And then James. I didn't like to look at James because I didn't like to accept that he was a good-looking person. But I didn't mind the way his hair stuck up- whether he made it do that or not- and I liked the shape of his neck and shoulders, how he was just an inch or two shorter than Sirius...

I frowned at myself. This was an unfair female weakness. I hated when I had to remind myself of his personality. It ruined admiring him from afar like one of the many lovestruck fourth years that ogled James Potter and his comrades on a daily basis.

As if reading my mind, he turned around, giving me a smirk and a wink, like we had some secret friendship we had been keeping a secret for years. I did my best to not smirk back and his smirk morphed into a crooked smile. Training my eyes on the Head Boy badge and Quidditch captain badge on his chest, I tried to ignore him.

"Is Potter making you blush?" Emmeline hissed at me, leaning in to get to my ear.

"No," I said. "I'm not going to deny that he is nice to look at Em, but I'm not getting over his personality anytime soon."

"I could get over his personality for a few, brief, heated, passionate moments in my dormitory," Marlene whispered longingly.

"Marlene!" Mary scolded harshly, probably too loud. Each one of the four heads in front of us turned around, clearly curious as to what the outburst was about. The four of us burst into cackles. Mature, we usually were, but in the end we were also teenage girls.

We peeled off in our separate ways, because not all of us had Potions first thing. When I followed the trail of students into Professor Slughorn's classroom, all of the Gryffindor's crammed into a single table, Emmeline, Sirius, Remus, James and me. The tables were built for four but with an unobtrusive flick of James' wand, the table enlarged enough to accommodate all of us, while the Hufflepuff table shrunk silently to fit their three people.

"Lily my dear, my dear," Professor Slughorn exclaimed, shuffling over to the table and putting a kind hand on my shoulder. "I trust you had a splendid summer?"

"I did, thank you," I said kindly. "I hope you did as well?"

"I did," he said. "I holidayed in Spain for most of it. It was nice to get some sun in the south there."

"That sounds wonderful," I said. "Sun would be nice. South of France, south of Italy maybe... someday. I've never been too far from home." I smiled to myself. And when I looked across the table, I saw James smiling too.


End file.
